Hi,
I will be writing petition to my government (Poland) to try to get them to ban Windows at schools. I believe it should be illegal to force children to use systems that are paid and use children’s data for AI and advertising.
Maybe you will do it as well? Let’s end this insane practice.
Fuck it, rant time.
I was IT lead at an education trust (kinda like a school district but bigger) covering K-21 for a long time, managing a few thousand endpoints for a few thousand students. Laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, digital signage and embedded; devices belonging to schools, partner organisations, staff BYOD and student remote learning; structured IT suites in school campuses, stateless networks for anything portable, antique appliances that simply must work but also be accessible to particular people from anywhere; it goes on and it never ends.
No-one has time for that.
From a few central interfaces, I could deploy an application to every device. And, I could make sure that a particular website was accessible to every student from their fifteenth birthday, not a day before. And, I could make sure that any device a Ukrainian refugee logs into speaks Ukrainian. And, I could remove any bloatware. And, I could make sure that when a brand new laptop is drop-shipped to a teacher’s home address directly from the distributor it will automatically configure itself with everything they need the second they connect it to their home Wifi without me even having to touch it. And, I could apply a photo-of-the-month to every device, even overlaying it with the appropriate school’s logo. And I could disable (or force enable) any unwanted hardware or software features on any device. And I could make sure that every student’s web traffic was appropriately filtered and, if nessecary, scrutinised.
And I could prove that all of it was working: I could prove it to staff, to parents, to governors and, when it came to it, I could prove it to the police and to lawyers. “When”, not “if”.
Forget schools for a second, look instead at big corporations. They are ruthlessly profit focused, but they all run Windows, Office, SharePoint, 365, etc because even though it costs money, it’s cheaper overall and comes with a lot of protection, both technical and legal. Schools get that stuff basically for free, and it just works. Linux isn’t there yet, not by a long shot, and no education authority worth their salt is going to take the risk of being the first to experiment with their student’s wellbeing, let alone curriculum, for effectively - in their eyes - zero benefit.
To be blunt: when one of the children you are responsible for safeguarding is the victim of an attempted kidnapping that was only possible because of lax data security, no-one is going to have any tolerance for your personal philosophy about software licensing or your home-spun scripts. Ask me how I know.
Also, if your schools are letting advertisers/social media/whatever inspect student’s data, that’s nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with mismanagement: forcing them to manage yet another OS isn’t going to fix that.
TLDR: If you want to make Linux replace Windows in schools, you first need to figure out how to make Linux replace Windows in hospitals, call centres and Fortune 500 corporations.
FOSS geeks are incapable of grasping why industry standards are industry standards. They genuinely believe that all major orgs only use Windows because they’ve been bribed/tricked into using it.
Out of curiosity when did you get out? We have kids in elementary school and they were issued Chromebooks. Our older one is expected to bring it to/from school daily.
I hate the device. Chromebooks kneecap computer literacy. This kid also has a (used) Thinkpad, but greatly prefer the Chromebook because it’s not locked down. It has no time limits, can access websites like YouTube with zero content filter, etc. It’s on a VPN so I can’t easily block sites like I can on everything else, but at least I can limit Internet access time to make it less appealing to use. The list goes on.
Another source of annoyance are the apps teachers use to communicate. Teachers are allowed to choose between two and one of the apps paywalls functionality behind a subscription.
I got out of it about three years ago. I’m pretty proud of what I got done but I cannot say I miss it.
Kids of a certain age would often be issued a device for their exclusive use - that’s not all that uncommon - but requiring them to lug it home is a bit much, especially if they have a useful computer at home already.
I also hate Chromebooks. I’m not against the idea of a super simple boot-to-browser type device per se, but the artificially limited lifespan of the devices is ridiculous and ChromeOS is a pain in the ass to manage compared to other OSs. In the end, we actually found we were better off running Windows or MacOS and applying policies that limited use to a very specific set of applications. Also, we found that running Windows with only Credge available was usually snappier; you know ChromeOS is utter dogshit when it get outperformed by Windows+Edge on the same hardware, and it comes with the added benefit of being able to lift the policy at a moment’s notice, returning the device to a full OS.
With regards to the VPN and filtering thing, it sounds like they’ve done half a job. Depending on when you are, the school is likely ultimately responsible for what happens on a school-issued device, and that usually does mean having an always-on VPN that routes all traffic via the school’s web filtering/logging appliance of choice. I used Headscale for our VPN and had a couple of VPSs running FortiOS for that purpose. I get that you want to apply your own filtering, but the school probably just doesn’t have the time or staff to deal with supporting complicated home networks. That said, is absolutely sounds like they’re failing in their duty of care if they’re allowing unrestricted all-hours access: the default policy I set was a very restricted set of teacher-picked sites when they were out of school unless the parent/guardian specifically signed a waiver saying they’d take responsibility: even then, we still had to apply some filtering and logging and we offered to limit the number of hours per day.
Don’t get me started on those fucking apps.
That seems like a severe over-engineering.
Linux isn’t there yet, not by a long shot, and no education authority worth their salt is going to take the risk of being the first to experiment with their student’s wellbeing, let alone curriculum, for effectively - in their eyes - zero benefit.
This is the crux of your ramble and it’s nonsense.
The reason orgs use these tools is productivity, not the well-being of the students. To conflate the two is to admit you’re a lackey of capitalism.
If the orgs cared about student well-being, they wouldn’t be training them on proprietary systems and letting corpos harvest their data. Period.
not just “productivity” but liability protection.
Good point.
Not letting sunlight into classrooms seems cruel to the children.
It’s necessary in the US to make it harder for the shooters
That’s funny. I laughed. Then quickly remembered my kids are entering the school system soon. Then I thought this was a pretty good idea. Now I’m sad.
We need a new distro called skylight.
Should people use OSS? Yes. Should it be illegal to not to? Hell no.
The advertising caveat there I can get behind, but that’s not about paid vs unpaid.
Policy and legality are two wildly different things.
would you rather schools force kids to use the miserable devices called “chromebooks” instead?
Makes no sense. If you ban windows it makes it harder to snipe a school shooter. /s
Promoting open source software and funding them is better than banning proprietary software. Improving data protection laws will also be more productive as a blanket solution rather than selectively banning companies with suspicious data practices.
My university had several lecture halls without windows, and it sucked!
Agree, a 100% free distro should be the default in schools. And free programs. No proprietary app should exist on computers.
best thing to include a few screenshots of how easy linux mint is to use and navigate today.
I thought you meant banning actual windows. Once I figured out it made a lot more sense, and I agree completely.
I thought the Enterprise and LTSC versions didn’t have all that?
They don’t. Neither does Windows AME.
You should be worried about some other things happening in Poland.
I wouldn’t “ban Windows at school” as a whole but I would:
- ban schools from installing windows in school computers
- teachers and students can still use it on their own computers, if they want
- ban teachers from requiring windows-only software
- regardless of what you use at school, teachers would often require MS office or Adobe for homework, which would force students to use windows at home
Fully agree.
- ban schools from installing windows in school computers
While I agree with the petition, it shouldn’t be limited to Windows, it should be about software freedom…
Yes, macOS should also count
That actually makes a lot of sense, if you remove concepts such as “but Windows is already customary here” from your head. From scratch, you’d never want to do this.
If such a petition exists for the Netherlands or EU-wide, I’d sign and subscribe/support.
